Does functional programming work?

[Walter Bright]

retard wrote:
>> Regarding Smalltalk, its syntax is weird for people that come from
>> C/C++
> 
> I claim that currently this is the main reason for people not adopting 
> Smalltalk or any other language. Even if smalltalk was 50% faster than C+
> + and 100% safer, there would be legions of morons how still want to 
> stick with C++ or C when building end-user GUI applications. Mainstream 
> programmers don't want to use their brain - they're happy with the C 
> family syntax and refuse to learn any other syntax. After all, with the 
> common syntax you can more or less easily use c,c++,c#,d,java,scala,php, 
> and many less known languages. Most mainstream programmers also only know 
> the parts of these languages that they all share - a nice imperative 
> dialect which is very handy for writing ugly, buggy, and badly performing 
> business code.


Syntax is just syntax, not semantics, and I'm not sure there's any 
particular reason why Smalltalk could not use curly brace syntax. If I 
was the Smalltalk creator, and syntax was the barrier to adopting it, 
I'd change the syntax.

D deliberately uses the C/C++/Java style syntax because that is the most 
popular and well known.